Mono project founder Miguel de Icaza claims that Microsoft prevented the open source project from holding a meeting at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. Microsoft states on its conference Web site that its 'Birds of a Feather' sessions are proposed and voted on by the community. But the Mono BOF was never listed for voting and therefore received no votes, despite the submission being confirmed, according to De Icaza's blog.

Apple's PowerMac line will see an upgrade in the near future, possibly before the close of the month. IBM's July announcement noted that the PowerPC 970MP would be available in speeds of 1.4GHz to 2.5GHz. Apple is expected to adopt the 970MP at least at the high-end of the new Power Mac G5 line. So, what are your thoughts on the 970MP? Does it nullify Apple's reasoning behind the switch to Intel? Also note the low-power G5 IBM has released alongside the 970MP.

The latest release of the GNOME Journal is available. This edition includes stories on Google's Summer of Code, GOCollab, the Banshee music player, and more.

Palm has revolutionized the PDA industry. In 1996, it released the Pilot and in less than ten years, sold 38 million devices outfitted with Palm OS. Read about the development of the Pilot (and the ill-fated Casio Zoomer and Graffiti for Newton) here.

Here are a couple of good articles from the SOA front. The first one provides guidence to architect a powerful and flexible Service-Oriented Architecture that integrates heterogeneous data, simplifying your IT solutions. The second article explores the next-generation business process server, which automates business processes and supports all styles of integration based on SOA and open standards.

Linus Torvalds' bid to have the word 'Linux' trademarked in Australia has failed, with the local intellectual property regulator sending his lawyer a vitriolic letter deriding efforts to provide evidence the trademark application was legitimate. In the letter, published by ZDNet, the regulator points out that information from Wikipedia and Google used by the lawyer to support the trademark application is simply not effective in making the case for a trademark to be registered.

Indonesia's Ministry of Research and Technology Thurday said it will implement a Java Desktop System on Linux as a national-standard desktop, customed-designed for its own culture. This desktop software will be a major component of the new Indonesia Goes Open Source (IGOS) program that aims to help eliminate the "digital divide in the world's largest archipelago," the ministry and Sun Microsystems said in a joint announcement.

Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Solution brings together the power of commodity x64 (64-bit x86) computers, the ease-of-use and security of Active Directory, and the Windows operating system to provide a secure and affordable high performance computing (HPC) solution.

In a move that shows just how far Microsoft has come, and how pervasive open-source software is in certain areas, the software powerhouse is, for the first time, including open-source technology in one of its shipping products. Microsoft plans to include the Message Passing Interface in its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, which went to public beta this week at the Microsoft Developers Conference here and is on track to ship in the first half of next year.

The pressure is growing on Novell Inc's management to make major strategic changes after a regulatory filing revealed a Novell shareholder has joined Credit Suisse First Boston in calling for change at the identity management and Linux vendor. The steps proposed by the investment firm include cutting costs by targeting Novell's two corporate jets, its "overstaffed" R&D department, legacy products, and its 400 NetWare engineers, as well as selling non-core businesses to enable funds to be redeployed.

"VIA is beginning to ramp up production on the successors to their C3 part, the C7 and C7-M CPU's. Keith Kowal, marketing manager for VIA's chipset platform group, took some time on his promotional tour to talk with us about the new platform."

Why didn’t Jobs, ever the maverick, opt for the scrappy challenger, Advanced Micro Devices, instead of the old-money establishment, Intel? The reason, industry analysts say, is that Jobs has a clear goal in mind: innovative designs. And such designs require the lowest-voltage chips, which IBM and Freescale were not going to make with the PowerPC chip core - and which AMD has not yet perfected.

Again, more news from the PDC. Microsoft senior vice president Steven Sinofsky took the stage Wednesday to discuss Office 12, which he said would hit Beta 1 within a "couple months." Betas of the Open Office XML format schemes are available starting today. Also, more screenshots of Vista build 5219 can be found here, shots of IE7 here. MS also announced a developer's toolbar for IE 6 and 7. The toolbar would allow the developer to see how pages would look in various screen resolutions, validate HTML and CSS code, and perform numerous other functions that Web designers would find useful. You can read transcripts of the various keynotes here.

The Mozilla Foundation plans to "shortly" release new versions of its Firefox and Mozilla Web browsers to address a recently disclosed serious security bug as well as several additional flaws, a representative said Wednesday.